A middling memoir of a young man’s attempts to live as a modern-day ascetic.
A recent college grad discovers how to live life and pay off his student loans at the same time.
After graduating from college with $32,000 in student loans and no lucrative job offers, Ilgunas decided to take an unconventional approach to paying off his debt. He embarked on an epic road trip, including stops in Alaska to clean rooms in a tourist camp and in post-Katrina Mississippi, where he worked clearing debris. With his room and board paid for and few distractions, Ilgunas was able to pay off his loans in under three years. He then decided to attend graduate school. To avoid incurring more debt, he knew he had to keep his living expenses to an extreme minimum. A Ford Econoline van solved that problem, and Ilgunas managed to live in a campus parking lot for two years. Ilgunas’ story gained traction when it appeared as an article in Salon; the novelty of his lifestyle may appeal to a generation of overly indebted and underemployed college grads. On his journeys, he met a diverse cast of characters, yet, despite a brief relationship with a young woman, his was a lonely life; socializing was just too expensive. Ilgunas has some interesting stories to tell, but his writing style is clichéd at best and more often clunky and rambling. The pacing is further weakened by loosely researched generalizations about the problems with “society”—e.g., comments like, “while I worried that my parents might get laid off, I couldn’t have cared less about this ‘Great Recession’ ” exhibit an annoying self-absorption that sets the tone for much of this memoir. And while Ilgunas tries to reference Thoreau—imagining his “vandwelling” life as a kind of transcendental experience—his story is really about the crises facing American higher education. That a student can’t get a degree without sacrificing basic human rights like food, clothing, shelter and love makes this story a tragic one.
A middling memoir of a young man’s attempts to live as a modern-day ascetic.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02883-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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